Monday, February 10, 2003

Server issues: cost, reliability, etc. I listened to most of Sun's live web cast this morning - fairly interesting stuff, basically justifying their higher costs for servers based on superior packaging, higher quality, etc. I use an old PC running SuSE Linux for my server. It will be interesting to see how this battle of the marketplace will play out. Will companies play it 'cheap' and go with low cost Intel based PCs running Linux, or go with high end servers from Sun, IBM, etc.? BTW, my approach is to use a cheap server, but to have a spare 'ready to go' by plugging it in, switching ethernet cables, and powering it on. 3:56:46 PM

Supression of dissent in the U.S. Like most of my friends and family, I hope that our government shows patience and waits for full UN support instead of unilaterally attacking Iraq. Regardless of our opinions of rushing to war or being patient, there is one thing that we U.S. citizen's should agree on: we all have a constitutional right to express ourselves. I was unhappy to see in the news that the conservative republican Mayor of New York City and police commissioner seemed to be publically bragging about holding up required permits for peace demonstrations. This is the kind of behavior that I would expect from communist China - not the U.S. Shame! Let's keep our values and respect the U.S. Constitution. 3:28:36 PM

Business plans: information portal products Now that I have KnowledgeBooks.com running on my own dedicated server, I am working hard on my information portal products. My plan is simple: combine my proprietary technology (e.g., natural language database interfaces, automatic text classification, etc.) with Open Source infrastructure software to create a set of associated information portal products. In order to both demo the KnowledgeBooks.com products and to let people have fun experimenting with them, I am using backend knowledge sources from: CIA Factbook Company information from the SEC Edgar database Current news processed from a few news web sites (who have given me permission to post automatically generated summaries and links to their sites) 1:52:28 PM

© Copyright 2003 Mark Watson. Last update: 9/16/03; 7:34:48 AM.